Chinese Communist "princeling" Bo Xilai, expected by many to take a key leadership position in the leadership transition of 2012, was expelled from the Communist Party in September after a career that saw him as Mayor of Dalian City, Minister of Commerce and Party Chief of the Chongqing municipality. His wife Gu Kailai received a suspended death sentence in August 2012 for murdering British business partner Neil Heywood.

Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden (centre) seen with Jiang Feng Dolby in an screenshot from the documentary.

A woman central to the downfall of former Chinese Communist Party Politburo member Bo Xilai has returned to the public spotlight by interviewing the Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf.

Jiang Feng Dolby, a former Chinese national television anchor, hosted The Nobel Files, a documentary filmed in Sweden about the Nobel Prize in Literature, which included an interview with members of the selecting committee and the Swedish monarch.

The show began to circulate widely on Thursday, after Southern Weekly, the Guangdong-based publication that commissioned the five-part documentary series, shared a link to it on its Sina Weibo microblog. The video has since been deleted.

The documentary was made in December last year, after Bo’s downfall and ahead of his trial, said Du Youke, a culture editor with Southern Weekly. A timestamp on a video of the documentary indicated that it was intended for broadcast in early August, two weeks before Bo stood trial and Jiang’s association with him became public knowledge.

Prosecutors presented a villa in Cannes she owned in southern France as key evidence for Bo’s guilt on charges of bribery. Jiang was the nominal owner of the villa, which once had belonged to Bo’s wife Gu Kailai, testimony revealed.

Jiang’s former lover, prominent entrepreneur Xu Ming, had bought the villa for Gu in 2001. It returned to Xu’s ownership in 2011 and was later passed to Jiang. It is not clear whether she is still the owner of the villa or whether she is facing prosecution for her involvement in the scheme.

Bo is serving a life sentence on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power. Gu is serving a suspended death sentence on murder charges. Xu, detained on suspicion of bribery and running an illegal operation following Bo’s downfall, testified at Bo’s trial and has not been seen since.

“Put people in the headlines who should be there,” Jiang wrote in a terse post on her Sina Weibo microblog, reacting to the flood of attention on Thursday. The former anchor, who became a British citizen by marriage in 2004 and has two children, is now living in Britain.

Jiang and the Southern Weekly did not respond to requests for comment.